Well, that's your right. A coal miner can quit, leave and go do something else. A slave can't. A coal miner's kid can go do anything with his life. A slave's kid is a slave, too. But, hey, to each his own.
I mean, you might be happy serving Jefferson, but maybe tomorrow he'd sell you to pay for some frippery at Monticello that distracts him for a week or two, and you end up stuck in a malarial swamp for a few years until you die of disease or out in the field working from sunup to sundown. Unless, of course, you didn't work hard enough, in which some sadistic bastard will open your back for you. Your spouse and children would either stay with Jefferson (if he still owns them) or they'll be sold someplace else. Maybe your beautiful young daughter will be given to one of the master's house guests to rape as his plaything. Would you ever see them again? Who cares. You don't count. You're livestock. But let's say you're smart, and you claim your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (you could have sworn that you heard that expression from someone, but from whom???) You run away. You're soon chased by dogs and worse and even if you do escape, maybe North, you have worry every single day of your life. See, the slave owners have rigged the system so that they get credited with federal representation for 3 out of every 5 of you there are, as an insult to your bondage. They have ensured that at any moment agents of the state may legally kidnap you and spirit you away back into slavery. Oh, and if you are a woman, and you have a child in, say, Vermont, years after you ran away, that child is a slave too and is kidnapped along with you. Neat, huh? When you return, will you be branded? hobbled? killed outright? Who knows. Who cares, really. You're not a person. You're just a slave. Property. A thing.
But if you'd rather be a slave, that's your business.
At the present time, both a coal miner's kid and the descendant of one brought here to be a slave, both have the rights to quit a job, etc.. But it was not always thus. And this illustrates the absurdity of those who want to treat the existence of Slavery in the Old South as some sort of outlandish crime against civilization.
Prior to the reign of George III--the one the Founding Fathers repudiated--both coal miners and salt miners in the North of England were deemed the property of the mines in which they labored. Their daughters, on the other hand, could gain a monetary stipend by bearing future coal miners. While it may not have been called slavery, it was the same thing.
The fact is, that virtually every race and sub-race on the planet, has at some time used some form of forced labor, or bondage system. It is one of the most frequently recurring social patterns in the human experience. You and I may feel it is a mistaken system; but neither you, nor I, have been anointed by God to define its morality. That does not, of course, mean that we cannot rationally argue against its reimposition in other, perfectly valid terms.
William Flax
Why do you invent some counterfactual like this? Do you have any evidence that ThJ ever did something like this? The idea that a coal miner's kid can do anything with his life is equally fanciful. History is about real stuff. I can assure you that some of my great-grandparents, no doubt, wished they were someones slave. There are many human conditions that are worse than slavery, but it just doesn't suit the revisionist history of northern aggression not have been fighting for the noblest of all causes.
3 out of every 5
You really need to understand some history before you engage in these sorts of discussions. The northerners wanted to count slaves as 0 out of every 5; the southerners wanted to count them as 5 out of every 5. The 3/5 was a compromise, and it had nothing to do with anyones view of the humanity of a slave.
ML/NJ (Lifetime Yankee)